Eh, I think both you and the poster below are making a mistake in using the population of the city center of Detroit. The city center is making a bit of a comeback, but the majority of the population lives in the surrounding metro area, which still has a population of roughly 3.7 million.

And before you complain about that being a much bigger area, here's the land area for metro Detroit compared to some of China's biggest cities:

Detroit metro: 1,337.1 sq mi

Guangzhou Urban: 1,483.95 sq mi / ~11 million

Shanghai Urban: 1,550 sq mi / ~24 million

Chengdu Urban: 1,760.0 sq mi / ~11 million

Chinese cities typically have boundaries roughly equivalent to US metro areas. They certainly have larger populations than Detroit, but not as much as you guys think.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metro_Detroit

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guangzhou

[3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai

[4]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chengdu

But to be fair on the comparison of debt, the $14b debt was to the city of 700k people not to the metro area of 3.7m.

Fair, I overlooked that.

But given the unique situation of Detroit, and the fact that US cities are generally organized in quite a different fashion to Chinese cities there's really no good use in comparing the two IMO.

Also, Detroit is a really weird case. It's a city that picked at a 1.9M population and was sized to handle that.

Then it fell to a 0.7M population.

When your city infrastructure and services are sized for 2 to 3 times your population, said population cannot sustain these infrastructure and services, and it's also really difficult to scale down these.

This is in sharp contrast with Chinese cities that are nearly all growing at a fast rate, maybe too fast in fact.

I'm aware it's an over simplification, but it illustrates the twos are not really comparable.